Thursday, March 14, 2013

"That Mysterious Rubber Band Called Time"

Snippets and
snapshots…a tableau of evidentiary pieces supporting the “That Mysterious Rubber
Band Called Time” hypothesis.

The Pre-Hypnotic
Suggestion

I buy a book called “How To Write A Screenplay In Twenty-One
Days.”I read the book.

I then proceed to write a screenplay in exactly twenty-one
days.

Tick……………...…..tick………………......tick………..............

You hand in your
pilot, and then wait for the network to respond.Every second feels like a week and a half.

Ticktickticktickticktickticktick…

I am delivered home after a sixteen-hour day on The Cosby Show, I blink my eyes, and I am
sitting in the car, on the way back to work.

The Subjective Click
Track

Every week, my wonderful piano teacher
Gary assigns me some homework from a book called Hanon: The Virtuoso Pianist – In Sixty Exercises.While practicing, my metronome clicks out
a steady tempo.An element of the
assignment involves playing in time with the metronome.

This is what I experience during my week of preparation:

When I am learning the assignment, the metronome tempo is
too fast, and I cannot keep up with it.After practicing a few days, the metronome and I are in sync.And when I’ve mastered the exercise, the
metronome feels draggingly slow.Even
though it is clicking at the same tempo during each of those three different
junctures.

(Okay, I know why it feels fast at the beginning of my
practicing.But I am less clear on why
it feels draggy at the end.Beyond its
specificity, I invite you to savor this temporal relativism as an overarching
metaphor.)

Necessity Is The
Mother Of Compression

As a rule, I need three to four hours to prepare a
publishable blog post.A friend informs
me he’ll be dropping by for a visit, at a time that will require me to get my
work done in an hour and a half.

I produce an entirely acceptable blog post in an hour and a
half.

“The Habitual” (Or “The
Enjoyable”)

Following a succession of annoyingly late arrivals home by
his writer-wife induced by a series of horrendously long rewrite nights, the writer’s
perplexed husband – a “non-pro” as they call it, designating a non-participant
in show business – issues a confrontational challenge.

The “non-pro” husband proposes that, as an experiment,
writing staffs be allotted a predetermined number of hours to complete a
rewrite – his suggestion being two hours – so as to test the proposition that,
given a hard deadline, the writers would complete the rewrite in that time,
rather than dragging things out until two in the morning.

I am not aware that this proposal was ever seriously
considered.Leading me to suspect that
the extended rewrite night process has evolved over time into an a established traditional
habit.Or that a substantial number of TV writers secretly enjoy the
rewrite night give-and-take, and they want
it to last as long as it does.

Personalizing the issue – as I inevitably do – my musings
take me back to the previous example,
in which I mentioned that, barring rare occasions where I am externally pressed
for time, my blog posts take me three to four hours to complete, leaving me to wonder
if the work takes that long because, for some inexplicable reason, I
want it to.

I have demonstrated I can finish the work in an hour and a
half.Why would I insist it take longer?And if I am not insisting it take longer, why does it?